Learn how to play the sponsorship game

I got on the phone with Rex St John, who is a Seattle-based evangelist for Intel Mashery. He spends a lot of time working on the Intel Edison, but Mashery also accounts for a big stable of API's including Beats Music and Klout. We talk about the distinction between public and private API's, developer experience, and touch on the future of hardware hacking at events.

I got on Skype with Tyler Nappy of Mailjet to talk about transactional email, the evangelism scene in New York City, and being a TechStars alum. I met Tyler at HackCC in Santa Monica, a where I worked as a pinch hitter for their sponsorship team. Mailjet is a transactional email service which has a strong presence and financial backers in Europe.

Via Mike Swift's referral, I got on Skype with Randall Hunt, who is an Evangelist at Amazon Web Services, based in New York City. I felt that this conversation was a turning point, because in our pre-show warmup he mentioned he'd listened to my entire back catalog of shows to prepare. Imagine how inspiring it was to get confirmation that my work is delivering value to someone who has been in the game for a while. Anyway, we talk at length about the evangelism scene, HackNY fellowship, and what it was like to intern at NASA. Plus, we chat about AWS products and how to be a friend to hackers.

I got on a call with Mike Stowe of Mulesoft to talk about how they connect API's using an open source solution. He actually picked up programming without any formal CS education (he originally studied to be a nurse), relying entirely on the generosity and power of community - now he wants to pay it forward through his evangelism.

I skyped with Nicolai Safai, an evangelist for MakeSchool. MakeSchool is a practical education curriculum for software developers and startup founders. MakeSchool is a YC Alumni company and is based in SoMA (they share an office with Apportable). They offer a summer program and now yearlong courses. Nicolai actually studied Neuroscience at UC Santa Barbara, but made the switch to tech via his long-time friendship with MakeSchool founder Jeremy Rossman.

On Mike Swift's recommendation, I got on the phone with Ricky Robinett, evangelist from the communications powerhouse Twilio. Ricky is interesting to me because he has a somewhat unconventional evangelism game - his side projects have a way of grabbing attention.

I got on the phone (for the second time!) with Neal Shyam of Challengepost to talk about the hackathon game. Neal has an interesting perspective because Challengepost is a platform to power any sort of developer challenge - in person at hackathons, or online as a longer form competition. Brands like McDonalds and Coke have used the service, and many hackathons organziers lean on it as an event webpage. It preserves submissions, several hundred thousand projects are indexed currently.

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Interview flow:

0:00 Brief overview of Neal's background

Mechanical Engineer at CMU

worked on engines at caterpillar

ended up in B school at NYU

0:48 - Brief overview of your ChallengePost

CP started as a competition platform

focused on building a community around hackers

CP is place for software developers and designers to show off their stuff

it powers registration, submissions, judging, sharing

Looking at CP’s data, you can check out each hackathon’s different set of sponsors - you can see the trends

2:45 - What does a dev evangelist do?

Evangelist’s main job is to keep hackers engaged

if they run into problems get them the help they need

regardless of your event’s location CP can help

4:18 - CP is a meta tool, what are unique challenges you have faced?

Civic Challenges are an interesting thing Neal has done work on that most evangelists never get into

I got on Skype with Dennis Li of HackDuke, who now works at Coursera, a leading edtech company. He founded HackDuke, which has the theme of "Code For Good." They take the emphasis away from prizes and onto creating innovations with a social impact. He is not quite a developer evangelist, but he does represent Coursera at hackathons now that he works in Silicon Valley.

I got on Skype for an interview with Mike Swift. Most people call him Swift. His background is as a Developer Evangelist, a HackNY fellow, Sendgrid and Rutgers alum. He got into evangelism before founding Major League Hacking with Twilio Evangelist Jon Gottfried in early 2013 - it now spans 3 continents. I'll be catching up with him in NYC at HackCon 2015, continuing my streak (also attended back in Feb 2014).

I spoke with Sebastian Park from Namecheap/NC.me about his background in Evangelism. NC.me is a program where student hackers can claim a free domain name to use as part of their side projects, while Namecheap itself is a domain registrar at massive scale. We had a rapport and I enjoyed the conversation.